The increased deployment and popularity of cloud-based applications and services running on computing clusters of physical and virtual machines has significantly complicated configuration management tasks such as provisioning software, deploying software patches, upgrading servers, or the like. Currently, system administrators may employ a variety of ad hoc procedures to perform configuration management but for large machine clusters these ad hoc procedures may be inadequate. The inadequacies of ad hoc configuration management procedures may jeopardize the operations of critical cloud-based services. For example, ad hoc configuration management may require extended/unknown downtime for critical systems to update software and deploy patches. Further, ad hoc configuration management procedures may lack features that enable reporting, status, state monitoring, or the like, sufficient for complex configuration management jobs. In the absence of reliable information about running configuration management jobs, system administrators may have difficulty in monitoring the progress of complex configuration management jobs. Thus, it is with respect to these considerations and others that the invention has been made.